The Society of Jesus and Martyrs Cause promotion, 1850-1987
The Society of Jesus was consistently at the centre of the successive stages of what is often referred to as the Cause promotion, that is, the petitioning of the Sacred Congregation of Rites in Rome that it should consider the cases of those who had traditionally been regarded as martyrs for the Roman Catholic faith in England and Wales on the period of the Reformation. This was a long and convoluted process which is generally reckoned to have reached its highest point with the canonization of the Forty martyrs in 1970 and, also, to have become somewhat incoherent as it encountered the often contradictory impulses of post-war ecumenism. This paper will argue that the directors of the Cause were consistently subtle and sophisticated in their approach to the recovery of the collective memory of the English and Welsh Catholic community in this regard, and their work tells us, in fact, quite a lot about the shifting understandings of Catholicity in their own time.
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This page was last updated on 14 March 2025
